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I may be asking an obvious question, but I have been searching the IBM developerworks site for the last hour with no hint of any answers to my question.
Can I run Ubuntu 14.x in a PowerVM partition??
This seems simple enough. Redhat and SUSE have been able to do this for a long time. But I cannot find any definitive reference to running Ubuntu in a LPAR.
The follow-on question is...
Can I run Ubuntu 14.X in little endian mode in an LPAR under PowerVM on one of the new Power8 servers that support... [More]

A new update release for the 7.0 series of the IBM Advance Toolchain for Linux on Power is now available.
Fix for Boost's Spirit Integer parser fails to detect overflow .
GDB fixes for the following issues:
Enable support for XML target description.
Report no hardware breakpoint support correctly.
Fix internal-error when stack pointer is invalid .
OpenSSL provides 8 security advisories .
GCC fixes an internal compiler error while using "-m32... [More]

A new update for the 2.1 release stream of IBM PowerKVM is now available. It can be downloaded from Fix Central via the following link:
http://www-933.ibm.com/support/fixcentral/swg/selectFixes?parent=Virtualization%2Bsoftware&product=ibm/Other+software/PowerKVM&release=2.1.1.0&platform=All&function=all
This is the first release to support running RHEL 7.1 guest virtual machines. Additionally this release provides fixes for over 70 bugs and a host of CVE's.
About the IBM PowerKVM
... [More]

This paper describes the availability and use of the recently released Oracle 11gR2 Instant Clients. These are used to develop applications on Linux on Power that need a connection to the Oracle DB. Building an application with these Instant Clients allows the application to connect with an Oracle DB running on any platform Oracle delivers the database on.
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Instant Client availability on Linux on Power Systems

A new update release for the 8.0 series of the IBM Advance Toolchain for Linux on Power is now available.
This is the first release to support RHEL 7.1 on POWER little-endian (ppc64le). It also provides:
GCC fixes for:
GCC generates an insn not found error message when using -m32 -mpowerpc64 .
gccgo fixes the value of GOARCH on POWER little-endian.
gccgo added support for PPC64 ELF relocation types.
glibc provides:
Optimized implementations for... [More]

by Rafael Folco <rfolco@br.ibm.com>, OpenStack CI Engineer
This blog post shows in simple steps how to configure the IBM Storwize to use in OpenStack Cinder and Glance.
Cinder
Cinder uses the storwize driver to connect to the storage and create volumes in a pre-configured pool.
The configuration for Cinder is straight forward. An example of storwize settings in cinder.conf follows:
... [More]

by Jeff Scheel, IBM Linux on Power Chief Engineer
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In June of last year, I started publicly discussing the role that little endian (LE) plays in our Linux on Power strategy with the blog, J ust the FAQs about Little Endian . Then, in August I attempted to eliminate uncertainty in my Removing the FUD and Demystifying LE (little endian) article. With the announcement of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 beta delivering an LE version, it is time... [More]

by Rafael Folco <rfolco@br.ibm.com> and Mikhail Medvedev <mmedvede@us.ibm.com>
Nova Scheduler provides the RAM Weigher to weigh hosts by their RAM usage. The default behavior is to spread instances across all hosts.
However, if you have nodes with different memory sizes, the scheduler will run all VMs on the large memory systems first (until the VMs per node limit exceeds), and then start choosing the other hosts. There is nothing wrong with this, but you may want to spread your VMs... [More]

Excitement continues to build around Linux on IBM Power Systems from the first Scale-out POWER8 processor-based systems shipped in mid-2014 to the Enterprise POWER8 processor-based systems which began shipping in 4Q2014 and includes the Integrated Facility for Linux support. A big part of that excitement is around the new little endian distributions (Ubuntu and SLES), and their ties to the OpenPOWER Foundation (and the requirements it generates). Now, Red Hat has joined the party with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 Beta for Power Systems based... [More]

A great technical educational video has been posted over on YouTube from the Linux.conf.au 2015 conference.
KVM on IBM POWER8 servers , by Paul Mackerras
Paul Mackerras walks the viewer through how Linux has been extended to open-source firmware, KVM enabling, and the latest Linux-only POWER8 systems.
This is a 45-minute video - Paul's presentation in its entirety.
Interesting discussions points are the KVM handling of the SMT 8 threads per core, and the POWER8 "micro-threading" - which... [More]

by Rafael Folco <rfolco@br.ibm.com>, OpenStack CI Engineer
I've just published an article discussing some basic ideas for building a 3rd party Continuous Integration system. It covers important aspects to plan, install and configure a 3rd party CI environment to test OpenStack upstream patches.
The article also explains how the CI services interact each other and what kind of customization you need to test your platform or driver on OpenStack patches.
For more information about IBM PowerKVM refer to the... [More]

Introduction
System administrators are very used to handle several different complex services that run interconnected and in parallel on high availability servers. In this scenario, it is hard to understand all the architecture and application connections in a single server, so you do not break it when trying to fix or update something. It is also common to bump into servers that are not even updated accordingly, because the system administrators are so afraid of architecture the server was build, that they usually prefer not to touch... [More]

Now there’s an even easier way to get you started with your evaluation of the latest XL C/C++ (V13.1.1) and XL Fortran (V15.1.1) for Linux compilers for the little endian Linux distributions on Power Systems (Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, and SLES 12).
We are now hosting the latest evaluation versions on public apt-get and zypper repositories.
You can find everything that you need to get started at http ://p ubli c.dh e.ib m.co m/so ftwa re/s erve r/PO WER/ Linu x/xl -com pile r/ev al/p pc64 le /

Happy 2015 to everyone!
A new update release for the 8.0 series of the IBM Advance Toolchain for Linux on Power is now available.
This release provides:
An up-to-date version of OpenSSL: 1.0.1j.
An up-to-date version of GDB: 7.8.1
A new Valgrind version: 3.10.0
Binutils fixes for:
LTO discards symbol definitions on ppc64 .
Libgomp symbols require --plt-thread-safe on POWER7 .
GDB fixes for:
Fix internal-error when stack pointer is... [More]

Over on the DeveloperWorks C/C++ Cafe, two recent blog posts were made available. Good recommended reading.
Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem (MASS) Libraries for POWER8 processors
Vector libraries . The vector MASS library libmassvp8.a contains vector functions that have been tuned for the POWER8 architecture. The functions can be used in either 32-bit mode or 64-bit mode.
SIMD libraries. The MASS SIMD library libmass_simdp8.a contains an accelerated set of... [More]